Having only just got our breath back from AOL's $315m buyout of the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Twitter is in talks with potential suitors, including Facebook and Google, about a multibillion-dollar sell-up. Such a deal could value the micro-blogging site at $10bn (£6.2bn). Yes, $10bn.

But what do analysts make of it all?

Marshall Kirkpatrick, the esteemed social networking watcher, says Twitter being bought out by either Google or Facebook would be "terrible" for all involved, in large part due to a difference in culture at the high-valued internet firms:

"More interesting to me is the thought of one of these companies owning Twitter. That sounds terrible to me and to almost everyone who responded to an inquiry about it on Twitter. Why? Because the cultures of the two services are remarkably different.

"None of this is very likely to happen. There's little reason to believe that Twitter would sell to anyone, other than out of pressure from its growing roster of powerful investors. I find the whole conversation most useful as an opportunity to think about and better understand the difference between the services."

"If Twitter would actually sell for $10bn, Google should just step up and buy it (see the reasons here). The company would barely miss the cash, and Twitter would actually put it on the map in social media.

"We actually don't think a Twitter-Facebook deal is even plausible at this point. We think there would be a protracted anti-trust investigation prodded along by Microsoft and Google, and we don't think Facebook could come up with enough cash to make the deal work. We also think that, if Facebook were to get close to buying Twitter, Google would pay whatever it took to steal Twitter away."

Richard Holway, a technology analyst at TechMarket View, thinks Twitter's rumoured valuation is "absolutely unbeleivable" for a social network with apparently fewer income streams than Facebook. He said:

"Everybody is talking to everyone else at some point in time, so you do have to ask how serious these things are. But the whole way in which people make money online is changing. It's gone from the old Google models of search-based advertising to people doing it on social networking of one way or another – that could be closed gardens of Facebook, Apple or whatever.

"There's little doubt that Facebook has the greatest ability to change its closed garded into a fabulous profit earner, and I can understand why LinkedIn has a value too. With Twitter it's much more difficult to understand how it's going to gain revenue from their model. But that valuation is absolutely unbelieveable. I find myself gasping at somebody who could expect to get that for a company with a turnover of almost nothing."

"Acquiring Twitter would not fit at all with Facebook's acquisition strategy, which has up until now mostly focused on talent collection versus product, and is geared toward mobile and location. Twitter has 350 employees which is about 35 times larger than your average Facebook acqui-hire. Not to mention that at the $10bn valuation Facebook would be putting up 20% of the value of its own company.

"Google on the other hand has $35bn to spend and is rumored to be bulking up its social layer full force. Twitter would be a smart buy on multiple levels (but especially consumer perception) as it gears up to compete with Facebook. In fact many Twitter employees have already worked at Google including CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Evan Williams."

Richard Chirgwin, at The Register, says the "assimilation into the Chocolate Factory" (whatever that is) would be good news for Twitter:

"Assimilation into the Chocolate Factory would turbo-charge Twitter's currently nascent plans to turn a quid from advertising. While its 200 million claimed user base surely must include its fair share of TV-shoppers, coupon grabbers and all-round suckers, Twitter users have to date seemed resilient against the barrage of marketing and spam robots that already infests the service.

"Such a takeover would also ease the burden of data centre services on Twitter's cost base, with the Googleplex surely bigger than the 'fail whale'."